Patrick Shiroishi & Dylan Fujioka – Left up on the Tree

For several years now Patrick Shiroishi and Dylan Fujioka have been marking the anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which was issued by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Second World War and resulted in the displacement and incarceration of more than 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. Targeting the West Coast of the country and confirming one of Roosevelt’s longstanding prejudices while riding a wave of anti-Japanese hysteria following the attack on Pearl Harbor, towards the end of the war the detainees began to be released, with many opting to leave the country, while others remained and attempted to rebuild their lives in the United States despite having lost their homes, their businesses and most of their possessions.

A keenly personal matter for Shiroishi and Fujioka whose grandparents were interred for several years at Tule Lake, the largest and most punitive of the concentration camps which were formally known as relocation or segregation centres, through their No-No series the saxophonist and percussionist have sought to draw attention to the history and the legacy of Executive Order 9066, paying keen tribute to the people who were deprived of their freedom but persevered to allow successive generations of Japanese Americans to live and thrive in the United States, while also highlighting the latest surge of anti-Asian discrimination and violence which occurred at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

Imbuing their work with searing first-hand impressions, looming spectres of what was lost and bristling contemporary sentiments, their new album Left up on the Tree is technically the fourth in the No-No series and sounds both plaintive and urgent, faltering yet more combative than past instalments as Shiroishi’s typically reedy and expressive winds stretch out over Fujioka’s rickety and loping backbeats, which often stumble into military or brass band territory while remaining slightly dampened, loose and unbridled or instinctive.

Following the album opener ‘Misao’ with its slowly unspooling music box melody and the watery portent of ‘The Day That Was’, the middle tracks of Left up on the Tree are more swampy and fowl-like, for instance on the long ‘Taste of Dust’ where Shiroishi swaps the squawks of his soprano saxophone, which carry the shrillness of a party horn, for deeper and throatier honks over Fujioka’s incessant and shapeshifting percussion or on ‘Who Will Be Lost in the Stories We Tell Ourselves’ where the moist growls of his baritone saxophone are accompanied by a few belly-deep oohs and aahs.

By contrast ‘Scattered All Over the Earth’ is more lyrical, sounding almost like a nursery rhyme or lullaby as Shiroishi swaps out his reeds for a burnished folk theme on the guitar. ‘Another Year’ features a plosive and impulsive yet at the same time somewhat antsy drum solo, as Fujioka’s conga flurry of bass and toms by some internal logic finds its way towards Afro-Cuban rhythms, before the closer ‘Shatter Like a Pearl’ foregoes knotty entanglements and staccato patterns for a richer flow of sonorous horn, as Shiroishi layers his baritone and alto saxophones whose bifurcating lines are now more lustrous and sinuous as Fujioka skirts and slaps or clicks away at his kit, one final act of consolidation more than commiseration, lusty and velvety and proud.